Cats and dogs rule both publishing and the Internet, where cat videos are so hugely popular that the cutting edge Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis recently held a cat video festival that drew such enthusiastic crowds, the festival’s organisers were caught off guard.

And yet our collective fascination with animals, the myriad designs they inspire and the stories we write around them are nothing new, as the small but satisfying show Animal Stories at the Gardiner Museum nimbly demonstrates.

Curated by the Gardiner’s Karine Tsoumis, the family-friendly exhibition examines our relationship with the animal world over the past 300 years as expressed through the art of ceramics and porcelain, which sounds like a stretch until you realize, walking through the show, which deftly mashes up 18th century Meissen figurines with contemporary works by the likes of Jeff Koons and Shary Boyle, that ceramics are perhaps the ideal medium for capturing what captivates us about animal characteristics and behaviour.

Turns out we have one King of Poland to thank for all the Staffordshire dogs and See No Evil monkeys that came to populate middle class mantels for generations. As the founding patron of the Meissen porcelain manufactory, Augustus the Strong was able to combine his passions for ceramics, hunting and wild beasts into one (at least here in the West) new and emerging art form. One of the earliest pieces in the show is a very fierce and highly stylised white Meissen eagle (ca 1728-33) that Augustus commissioned for his Japanese palace, designed to hold his extensive collection of largely Asian porcelain.

Indeed, the hunt, and man’s dominance over nature emerge as a strong theme, particularly in pieces such as a Royal Hunting clock from 1732 adorned with tiny huntsmen pointing rifles from its porcelain ramparts. An exquisite creamware hound’s head was used as a quaff for wine on horseback by gentlemen on the hunting field. The hunt’s quarry, too, in the form of meat, is celebrated in a series of terrifyingly life-like animal tureens, the most spectacular of which is an 18th century French-made earthenware boar’s head that would have emitted steam from the hot soup inside through the boar’s uplifted snout.

Says Tsoumis: “The medium of ceramic is ideally suited for animal representations because of its sculptural and tactile qualities. In Europe, the animal figure’s emergence in the 18th century was tied to major technical advances — the most important being the discovery of hard-paste porcelain — and its immediate popularity related to the possibility of having a form of sculpture in the household that was lifelike enough to bring the experience of nature indoors.”

The scientific exploration of the natural world and its celebration among the educated classes during the Enlightenment with their Cabinets of Curiosity also made its mark. For the first time, such exotica as elephants and rhinoceros (Clara, the rhino star of Europe!) were depicted from life, and displayed in public zoos. A contemporary piece by Wendy Walgate called 5 Litres, in which three glass beakers are filled, variously, with ceramic figures inhabiting the earth, air and sea, speaks to this human urge to organise and classify.

The publication of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species only fuelled the fire of our monkey madness — though pre-Darwin, a fantastical monkey-handled teaware set from 1860 and a completely bewigged and dandified 18th century Meissen Monkey Orchestra display the human characteristics (both good and bad) we now ascribe to our ape ancestors.

Pet-keeping too, has shaped how we see our animal brethren: a pair of 18th century Meissen pugs with almost comically yearning eyes offer such a faithful portrait of our faithful friends that the taxidermied Winna Haughty Madge, the favourite pug of Montreal breeder Winnifred M. Stegall on display right next to them, looks like a larger, stuffed twin. Gentle Jumbo, pet of the Royal family, who met his demise in St Thomas, Ont. after being sold to P.T. Barnum is memorialised here.

As Tsoumis points out, “animals are given human characteristics to various effects — sometimes they make us laugh, sometimes they make us think.”

As the show illustrates with book covers and commemorative plates from the likes of Beatrix Potter to Winnie the Pooh, ever since Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, animal characters have been a staple of children’s literature. “But even if they are not necessarily given human characteristics, all the animals depicted in the exhibition are telling us stories about ourselves,” says Tsoumis. “Whether they are pets or hunted beasts, they are cultural creatures.” Which of course is another thing that this show shares with cats on the Internet — and all the more reason you should tear your kids away from their screens to come and see this show.

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